by John Cheever
•
As I wait for the train, a youth in tight white pants sets off the usual alarm signals, but then I notice that he wears the jacket of a school where I am known, where indeed one of my dogs lives. I ask after my friends on the faculty, ask after my dog, and the air between us is pristine and cheerful. It is facelessness that seems to threaten one, strangeness, a sort of erotic darkness, an ignorance of each other, except for the knowledge of sexual desire; but standing in a public urinal and being solicited by a faceless stranger one senses some definite promise of understanding oneself and of understanding death, as if the natural and sensible strictures of society, raised in the light of day, were to heavy a burden for our instincts and left them with no immunity to the infections of anxiety and in particular the fear of death. Run, run, run ballocksy through the woods, put it in the brushes of nymphs and up the hairy bums of satyrs and you will know yourself at last and no longer fear death; but why, then, do the satyrs have an idiotic leer? To have the good fortune to love what is seemly and what the world counsels one to love, and to be loved in return, is a lighter destiny than to court a sailor in Port-au-Prince who will pick your pockets, wring your neck, and leave you dead in a gutter.
•
I carry a heavy suitcase for a young woman—this simplest vision of things—but the suitcase is almost too much for my strength, and I am afraid I will pull my middle out of joint. The shoeshine man’s curly head, between my knees, reminds me of T., whose domesticity was clearly rooted in an early knowledge of cold and aloneness. Three days before Easter the city is festive. My shoes are shined, my suit is correct. There are many youths with long and dirty hair, dirty jeans, and white teeth. At the corner of Sixty-third Street and Madison a young man rests on his motorcycle, cleaning his dark glasses. He appears to be out of things, including the rebellion he has joined. Young women with skirts above their knees, old women with top-heavy headdresses of cloth flowers and with wounded feet, a man who has paid his tailor a fortune but walks like a duck. St. Patrick’s, which I enter at the elevation of the Host, is crowded. At the St. Regis, hair oil seems to be coming back. Pools of pinkish light stream from holes in the ceiling. I am very tired. In the old place the bartenders used to hook their wristwatches (three) around the neck of a liquor bottle. No more. I wonder if the bartender who serves me served me twenty years ago.
•
On the train home I share a seat with two men I have not seen for fifteen years. They both now have their white hair, as I shall presently. They both wear glasses. One of them has an alcoholic and circulatory ailment that has given his face the colors of an extended bruise. They discuss their lawnmowers throughout the trip. “I got a double-blade, three-horsepower Ajax rotary from Warbin’s two years ago. I’ve got my money back.” “Well, I got a single-blade rotary last year, but I’m thinkin of getting a reel mower this year,” etc. The conversation does not shift, for an hour, from the subject of mowers, excepting to go briefly to fertilizer. Warfare, love, money—the natural concerns of men—are barred from their talk. It is sincere, I expect; it is ceremonial: I suppose they dream of leaf mulchers, gasoline mixes. Their aim is probity, and yet it is the mad who, to cure the wildness of their thought, talk in such rudimentary terms.
•
Good Friday, and I do not find the day as sombre as I have in the past. Wood doves. A cloudy sky. Travelling acres of sunlight. I remember the Tenebrae being sung in Rome. This early in the year, the churches were still cold and damp. The poetic force of the sense that this world was given to us and given to us in pain. I will not go to church because B. will insist upon giving a sermon, and I will not have the latitude or the intelligence to overlook its repetitiousness, grammatical errors, and stupidity.
•
I wake. My older son has returned safely from school. The trees are full of birds. I mount my wife, eat my eggs, walk my dogs. It is the day before Easter.
•
I have a letter from an editor at Doubleday who suggests that I title my next book “Cultured Pearls and Other Imitations.” How strange and angular that someone unknown to me should go to the trouble of writing such a letter.
•
I watch the young man who drives the drugstore delivery truck come down the street. He has a bellicose and comical heft to his shoulders, as if he were just about to climb into a boxing ring, although his smile is so ingenuous and bright that it seems unlikely that he has ever hit anything. He pushes his neck forward with each step—a little like a drake—and usually, at this time of year, wears a jacket with a hood that lies in a heap on his shoulders. And I think that the writer is, tragically, jockeyed into the position of a bystander. He sees from hi window a woman stealing marigolds in the public garden, an old man pissing behind a tree, a game of catch in a vacant lot, but some cruel abyss seems to have opened between himself and these simple and natural sights; you can’t, after all, repair a carburetor or play football with a pen in your hand and too sharp and critical an eye in your head.
•
I seem, during the drive, grilled on brute worry. I think I will refuse to make long trips. Time seems Procrustean. My watch says eleven. My stomach aches, my scrotum itches, my heart thumps, my breathing is constricted, and my right eye droops. I look at my watch again and it says three minutes past eleven. I seem racked between the hour and the minute hand. I chain-smoke, and at half past eleven I drink some vodka. This must shock the children, but it is my only way of bringing any sense to the hour. New highways spread in every direction, and Mary observes that the Connecticut landscape with its farmhouses and trees seems, by some seismographic upheaval, to have been transformed into the buttes and canyons of another geologic past. She also observes, in the parish development, that all the native trees—apples and maples—have been cut and uprooted and replaced with flowering cherries, trimmed yews, and a lachrymose shrub that seems to produce showers of white tears; thus, we have a landscape that is both melancholy and gallingly artificial.
•
We meet my son, whom I love. The attachment seems to resist any analysis. I simply love him. His skin is clear, his face is muscular; we mostly joke. He speaks of giving up lacrosse because of the killer mentality of the coach. I do not urge him to keep it up, but I would like to. I want him to be distinguished, but I seem to want him to enjoy an undangerous distinction. I do not want him to burn his draft card and go to prison as a C.O. Do I want him to be pure but innocuous, an anonymous element in the stream of time, good and kind and virtually nameless; to embody that passivity we know to be most dangerous? We lunch poorly among the other parents. There is a lady who went to school in Switzerland with Mary. “We were in school in Switzerland together,” she says loudly. There are a few Yankee faces, and I consider myself to belong among them, although I may be mistaken. I consider myself distinguished. One could do worse. We attend a parents’ council meeting. The face, hands, and legs of Mrs. X are discolored with hooch, and her hands tremble as she reaches for a cigarette. This most strange, hard-drinking world. The chaplain speaks to us on sex education. A rather pale, clear-faced young man whose most memorable feature is his baldness. His baldness seems both active and plaintive: he seems to be losing his hair as he speaks to us. We are addressed on the urgency of sex education, and the matter of educating students is broken up into the biological facts of reproduction and the subjective and emotional aspects of sex. The fact is mentioned—of which I disapprove—that in their early manhood their powers are greater than they ever will be again. Adultery, masturbation, and homosexuality are brought up sketchily. I flinch at the mention of the last, as I always do. Should we educate our children or should we not? A man who has been picking his teeth urges that we first notify the parents of our intention and then, having received their approval, their opinion, we may proceed.
The process will take two years. One lady wistfully objects to the delay. One lady suggests that we all read an article on sex in Reader’s Digest. It is moved that we send copies
of the magazine to all the parents. “You may not agree with the conclusions,” says the lady, “but it is beautifully written.” It is Mary who observes, looking into these faces, that no one of us is capable of imagining a useful and candid course on the subject. The exaltations, catastrophes, perversions, and mystifications of erotic love are stamped on all these bewildered faces. And the balding advocate of sexual education: what about him? Why is he not married? Why is he so pale? What games does he play?
•
Murderers, assassins—did you ever know any? I don’t mean gangsters or hired gunmen; I mean law-abiding murderers. There’s this chap named Marples who keeps saying that he loves me and then tries to kill me. The first time it happened was at a party in New York. I was standing by this long window, and he gave me a push. Right below me was this fence made of iron spears, which I just cleared, landing on my knees on the sidewalk. I tore my trousers, but that was about the only damage—with a little less luck I would have been impaled. That was the first time. A year or so later we went to visit them at the sea. W walked up the beach one day—great chums—and we came to this tide rip, where he urged me to go for a swim. I was just about to dive in when an old man yelled at me and told me the rip was full of sharks. He said I wouldn’t last five minutes. Marples pretended to be surprised and very emotional about my salvation, although he had practically pushed me in. Somehow I never resented these attempts on my life; I never thought that he could bring them off. Sometime later we went to his house in the country for dinner. There were a lot of people and a lot of cars, and my car was in somebody’s way, and I went out to move it. He had to move his car. Well, I was crossing the driveway when I saw this car, his car, bearing down on me at full speed. I sprinted to safety, and he was very apologetic and emotional about having nearly run me over. And the last time I saw him he said that he’d heard I was sick. Excepting for a few head colds, I’ve never been sick in my life, but he gave me this very sad look as if I were wasting away. He’s a very quiet man, terribly sensitive, but he’s a murderer.
•
The first of June, and the world that was not mine yesterday now lies spread out at my feet, a splendor. I seem, in the middle of the night, to have returned to the world of apples, the orchards of Heaven. Perhaps I should take my problems to a shrink, or perhaps I should enjoy the apples that I have, streaked with color like the evening sky.
•
Very humid. The air over the Hudson Valley is like a discolored fog. A baneful sun is reflected in the window of the hardware store. I sit on the terrace reading about the torments of Scott Fitzgerald. I am, he was, one of those men who read the grievous accounts of hard-drinking, self-destructive authors, holding a glass of whiskey in our hands, the tears pouring down our cheeks. Thunder at three. The old dog trembles, and is so frightened that she vomits. The wind slams some doors within the house, and then I smell the rain, minutes before it begins to fall on my land. What I smell is the smell of damp country churches, the back hallways of houses where I was contented and happy, privies, wet bathing suits—an odor, it seems, of joy. When Fitzgerald drops dead, I burst into tears, as I wept over the account of Dylan Thomas’s death. This morning I cannot remember anything that occurred after dinner.
Thinking of Fitzgerald, I find there is a long list of literary titans who have destroyed themselves: Hart Crane, Virginia Woolf, Hemingway, Lewis, Dylan Thomas, Faulkner. There are those who lived, Eliot and Cummings, but there are few. Shall I dwell on the crucifixion of the diligent novelist? The writer cultivates, extends, raises, and inflates his imagination, sure that this is his destiny, his usefulness, his contribution to the understanding of good and evil. As he inflates his imagination, he inflates his capacity for evil. As he inflates his imagination, he inflates his capacity for anxiety, and inevitably becomes the victim of crushing phobias that can only be allayed by lethal doses of heroin or alcohol.
So I go to the shrink. His waiting room has as wide a collection of magazines as I’ve seen this year; but the waiting room is empty when I arrive, empty when I leave, and I wonder, Is he an unsuccessful shrink, an unemployed shrink, an unpopular shrink, does he while away his time in the empty office like an idle lawyer, barber, or antique dealer? He has large brown or golden eyes, a neat gray suit, and an office furnished with newly upholstered Victorian relics. I suppose some part of doctors’ education concerns the furnishing of the consultation room. Do their wives do it? I wonder. Do they plan it themselves? Is it done by a professional? I feel much better after talking with him. He does seem a little angular, a little inclined to contradict and interrupt. He seems at times to do most of the talking. Mary will go see him, and how wonderful it would be if we could clear this up.
•
Casting around drunkenly for some explanation of my grief, I think that perhaps I sought out and married a woman who would treat me as capriciously as my mother did, but a woman with whom I could quarrel as I could not quarrel with my mother. But I am deeply ashamed of myself for quarrelling. I think I am driven to it, I think I am meant to behave contemptibly, and yet I am deeply ashamed. I am deeply ashamed.
•
On the set I see the uneasy—and I think incurable—paradox with which I must live. Would I sooner nuzzle D.’s bosom or squeeze R.’s enlarged pectorals? At my back I hear the word—“homosexual”—an it seems to split my world in two. R., the stand-in, is a well-constructed young man with a vast expanse of tanned, hairless skin, and I feel for him, or think I feel for him, some sad and illicit stirring, but the moment I talk with him—as soon as I feel his place in the world, the quality of his mind, as soon as I can imagine his wife, or his parents, or the room where he sleeps—these unsavory matters vanish. It is ignorance, our ignorance of one another, that creates this terrifying erotic chaos. Information, a crumb of information, seems to light the world.
•
At the Children’s Center, I find my older son holding a little boy in his arms. The boy has been crying all day. His face is contorted and weary. He has no tears left, only dry, racking sobs. “It was his first day,” Ben said. “He’ll be all right tomorrow.” And I think of how painfully alien the world can seem when we first emerge from the rooms, and especially the fragrances, of childhood. Invited—or forced—to spend a weekend with Aunt Cora and Uncle Stephen, you find their bathwater, their sweat, the bacon they eat for breakfast all painfully unfamiliar and you are quite literally sick with longing for the bathwater, sweat, and bacon in your own cozy home, and in this simple cottage at the edge of the sea you taste for the first time the strangeness of those voyages, battlefields, and hotel rooms in which you will, as a grown man, find yourself frightened and alone.
•
But what I want to tell you about is the shrink. I thought our third interview, this one, would be like the end of a musical comedy. We would embrace, kiss on the threshold of his office, and tie on a can after the children had gone to the movies. His office is furnished with those modest antiques you find in small hotels. His desk, or some part of it, may have come into the world as a spinet. There are colored photographs of his children on the table. Why do doctors always impose on us photographs of their children? He wears, I notice, elk-skin walking shoes, quite new, and light socks with clocks, supported by garters. The gaze of his golden eye is vast and steady. His face might be described as soft. The picture, as I saw it, was that I, an innocent and fortunate creature, had married a woman who suffered from deep psychic disturbances. The picture, as it was presented to me, was of a neuroti man, narcissistic, egocentric, friendless, and so deeply involved in my own defensive illusions that I had invented a manic-depressive wife. The troubles of the psyche were described in a specious jargon. In the space of fifty minutes he said “meaningful” fourteen times, “interpersonal” twelve, “longitudinal” nine, and “structured” two. When I asked Mary if the bulk of our relationship hadn’t been happy she merely smiled. I am accused of being jealous of her career. The truth here is that because of my
mother’s business and my claim to having been neglected I have always been oversensitive to a woman who was less than wifely. He speaks with unamicable reverence, I think, of my stormy father-in-law. He hints, I think, at my humble beginnings, and to tell the truth my father was an unemployed shoe salesman and my mother supported the family with a hole-in-the-wall gift shoppe. Soiled underwear hung from a nail on the bathroom door. These are not all the facts, and my parents were people of some quality, I claim. I think he accepts two fixations for truths. One of them is that I am a friendless man. Mary has always claimed this, and I think it not true. She always felt that if I had a party no one would come. The other fixation is that I detest women.
•
I am fifty-four, but I still think myself too young to find my world sutured, to suffer nightmares about throughways and bridges. And I would like to discuss, to ventilate, my homosexual problems. I can vault them or hurdle them, but I would like to stop and give them some examination. And what can I look forward to here? Homosexuality seems to be an important fact in the troubled world I live in, and I mean to cure myself, not the world, and yet I feel, wrongly perhaps, that some of my anxieties can be traced back to this. There may be no solution, but I might be able to study the problem in a less tense and skittish manner.